The present invention generally relates to methods for selecting a physically attainable amplifier performance. More specifically, but without limitation thereto, the present invention relates to a method, system, and computer program to determine if a user-specified amplifier performance is attainable by cascading a given wideband amplifier with input and output matching circuits.
The amplification of a weak, noisy, wideband signal is a fundamental problem in electrical engineering. The amplifier increases the power of weak signal but also amplifies the input noise and adds its own “self noise.” Anyone fiddling with a car radio soon learns turning up the volume of a noisy signal merely makes a loud, noisy signal. In addition, the optimal amplifier should also be stable. The characteristic high-frequency “howl” of public address systems is an example of instability.
The amplifier designer typically selects a circuit topology, selects the reactive elements, constrains the reactive element values, and then attempts to optimize the element values. The difficulty of this approach is that there are many circuit topologies. This forces the amplifier designer to undertake a massive search to determine an optimal network topology.
To address this problem, the electrical engineering community has developed many amplifier matching programs. Some are kept current with on-line updates of the latest data from amplifier manufactures. Some programs include the effects of the biasing circuitry on the specified transistor operational points and the packaging parasitics. These programs compute the amplifier's performance for a specific device and topology.
However, there still remains a need to provide a better method to determine an optimal amplifier.